In 1951, abstract art took on new meaning and form in Brazil, largely through the impact of a retrospective of the Bauhaus artist Max Bill in São Paulo and the first São Paulo Biennial. Throughout the 1950s, Bill’s influence in Brazil contributed to the development of concrete art, a kind of abstract art, which championed universal principles of order and rationality, founded on objectivity and science. Together with Hélio Oiticica and other artists from Rio de Janeiro, Lygia Clark articulated her ideas about this kind of abstraction in the 1959 “Neo-Concrete Manifesto” (or “Manifesto Neoconcreto”). In it, the artists declared their break from the tenets of Concrete art with its systematic approach to abstraction. Clark, on the other hand, sought a freer and more organic interpretation of geometric abstraction, diffusing the boundaries between two-dimensional and three-dimensional form.

We see the organic nature of Bicho, in keeping with the ideas of Neo-Concretism, not only in its exoskeletal form and transformative nature, but also in its name. Whereas traditional sculpture hides its structural support, Clark instead focuses on it, by drawing attention to the hinges that bind the work together, and to the empty spaces created in between these folded spaces.

Clark made these sculptures to be participatory, and therefore variable. She challenged not only the idea that sculpture is fixed, but also that there is only one way to view or experience it. The sculptures are fundamentally unstable — both literally and metaphorically. They have no front or back, no inside or outside, no left or right. In this way, they have no author, since each participant creates a different experience of Bicho. Differing from performance art, however, these sculptures do not create spectacle but rather invite participation. The work of art is not the viewing of the sculpture itself, but one’s participation with it.

Clark arrived at Bicho through her exploration of the “organic line,” and its mutability in two and three-dimensional form. However, it was Ferreira Gullar, primary author of the “Neo-Concrete Manifesto” who called Bicho neither painting nor sculpture. Instead, Gullar described the work as a non-object (an early term for abstraction), one that did not have a function and that resisted categorization.